I’ve been thinking about Kate all day, and seeing the outpouring of grief here in my office and also on the Internet and Instagram, I realize what the Kate Spade line did: It was the beginning of the high-low thing. It was aspirational to young girls for their first job, and totally professional and wearable to women at the top of their game. There was no hierarchy about it; it was so democratic and so cute and fun and cool and sophisticated and edgy. Everybody could wear it. It was the first time a brand like that really existed as far as I was concerned.

It was a status symbol, but it was totally attainable. Do you know how many young girls have come to me today and said they knew they had arrived when they owned a Kate Spade bag? They knew they weren’t teenagers anymore; they were young professionals and it made them feel part of the adult world. I think that’s such a poignant and beautiful way to say what Katy—I knew her as Katy—launched. It wasn’t a bag. It was a mind-set and a spirit that just didn’t exist before she brought it to fashion. It just didn’t.

I worked with Katy from 1988 to, I don’t know, 1991 or 1992, at Mademoiselle, and watched her give birth to the brand, because she was still working as an accessories editor when she was working on the launch at night. I remember knowing at that time that it was going to be something important. It was nylon. It was cool. And they were square and cube-y and minimalist, sort of mid-century modern furniture to wear. And it made total sense at a time when I remember calling in Moschino, those European aspirational designer brands that had nothing to do with those of us who were working with them.

There was a sense of pride about it. Knowing the person behind the bag, it so reflected her; it was utilitarian and yet spirited. It was a study in contrasts, like Katy with her forever beehive but wearing men’s old chinos, which was basically her uniform in those days. She always carried vintage wicker, like Nantucket bags with a top handle. Like what Jane Birkin used to carry, but with a lid. It was always vintage, very structural. I think that’s where the square structure came from for her original nylon bags. She always had a structured top-handle bag.

The bags allowed you to infuse your personality and sort of DIY them because they were clean. She always had brooches on them, her vintage jewelry collection. I had punk-rock badges and sew-on patches of rainbows and other dumb things. I had that original cube bag forever, until I think my niece stole it in the early 2000s because she was into the retro-ness of it. Later I put Murakami buttons on it; it just kept growing. It was a canvas for that time in my life. I remember mine was navy with black webbing handles.

They were little handbags—they weren’t shoulder bags, they weren’t totes—in the first go-round. They were little ladylike handbags, but in this masculine, utilitarian, dark-colored nylon. So cool. I could be wrong, I could be romanticizing it, but I feel like she used nylon because it was cheap and cheerful and easy, and that was Katy. I remember being gobsmacked as a dorky new assistant in New York and she was wearing high heels with Andy’s khaki paper bag–waist pants. I could never imagine her doing a polished handbag collection at that time; it didn’t suit her.

She made everything fun. Her editing style was about taking risks and championing not just the obvious and the tried-and-true designers. She was a seeker. Later on in her career, after she sold Kate Spade, she was really active in getting young girls into fashion design, because that was always her thing, the young designers, the young people. For me, personally, that set the tone for my career. I never longed for the big brands of Europe. I wanted to dumpster-dive, quote-unquote, and find the new things, and that was definitely her influence. She brought so much newness to the table because she was willing to search the dark corners that maybe other editors never thought to do or were too busy spinning around at Gucci.

The entire Mademoiselle team was, of course, cheering her on the whole time she was launching the label. I remember shipping bags—at night we would help box and ship product. This is when it was just starting, and Barneys New York had bought it. I think that was her first client. And us being there late at 350 Madison Avenue and boxing stuff and sending it. That’s how homespun it was. There was no group of people more excited about the success of what it became than those of us who touched it and watched her giving birth to it while still holding down a job at a very popular magazine in a very high-stress industry. She did both.

That was the other thing about her. I always thought I wanted to be like her; I wanted to be able to do everything. She had a buoyant social life, this circle of cool girlfriends and guys and creatives and martinis and the Odeon, that whole ’80s thing. To see the brand take off like that. Once Barneys bought it, you knew this was going to be big. And you started seeing it everywhere. The girls in the know carrying those little cubes.

Once she sold the company, she kind of went away for a while; they have that gorgeous house in the Hamptons and she had her daughter, and it was time for her to kick back and reestablish who she was now that she wasn’t [at the company] anymore. But she was still wearing the khaki chinos, still had the perfect beehive, still had the red or hot pink lip while working the jewelry. She was my version of Iris Apfel. She was so, excuse me, fucking cool in every way. She was human Champagne, bubbly and effervescent, making everything bright and sparkly and funny and fun. She was human Champagne.

When I first started in magazines, I didn’t have a clue, so I didn’t know people who personified personal style. I just wasn’t exposed to that. She made it clear to me without ever saying it that personal style is the best expression of what’s going on inside of you. I didn’t have to look like all the editors at Condé Nast. And I remember—because I made no money; I think I made $14,000 a year—after seeing her, I bought black men’s suits and five white shirts; I remember they were all Bill Blass, from the bins out front of weird men’s clothing stores, and I wore that every day because I couldn’t afford to wear the fashion and the designers that the other girls were wearing. And Katy made that okay, and I’ve never gone back from that. She was the North Star to me of being fashionable without necessarily buying “fashion.” She always looked better than anybody who was in head-to-toe Gucci. She was to me the Pied Piper of what personal style was all about and didn’t make me afraid to not be just like everybody else. Because she was exuberant in her expression. She was very confident in who she was, and she wasn’t going to change that because she worked at a fashion magazine. And that’s when I realized that that’s what fashion was truly about.